I haven’t gone through all their work, but some of the delisted maintainers were working on driver support for Baikal, a Russia based electronics company. Their work includes semiconductors, ARM processors. Given the sanctions against Russia, especially for dual use stuff like domestic semiconductors, I would expect that Linus and other maintainers were told or concluded that by signing off and merging their code they’d be personally violating sanctions.

I recently removed in editor AI cause I noticed I was acquiring muscle memory for my brain, not thinking through the rest past the start of a snippet that would get an LLM to auto complete. I’m still using LLMs, particularly for languages and libraries I’m not familiar with, but using the artifacts editors in ChatGPT and Claude.

People haven’t really changed. As always, power corrupts. When the rewards are great enough, it seems people are often enough willing to compromise their integrity.

Key detail in the actual memo is that they’re not using just an LLM. “Wallach anticipates proposals that include novel combinations of software analysis, such as static and dynamic analysis, and large language models.”

They also are clearly aware of scope limitations. They explicitly call out some software, like entire kernels or pointer arithmetic heavy code, as being out of scope. They also seem to not anticipate 100% automation.

So with context, they seem open to any solutions to “how can we convert legacy C to Rust.” Obviously LLMs and machine learning are attractive avenues of investigation, current models are demonstrably able to write some valid Rust and transliterate some code. I use them, they work more often than not for simpler tasks.

TL;DR: they want to accelerate converting C to Rust. LLMs and machine learning are some techniques they’re investigating as components.

What do you mean by “this stuff?” Machine learning models are a fundamental part of spam prevention, have been for years. The concept is just flipping it around for use by the individual, not the platform.

If by reliably you mean 99% certainty of one particular review, yeah I wouldn’t believe it either. 95% confidence interval of what proportion of a given page’s reviews are bots, now that’s plausible. If a human can tell if a review was botted you can certainly train a model to do so as well.

Cool it with the universal AI hate. There are many kinds of AI, detecting fake reviews is a totally reasonable and useful case.

For people lacking context, Boeing split off and sold their division that became Spriti Aerosystems. The theory at the time was that Boeing’s core competency wasn’t building airplanes, it was managing relationships with other vendors. In particular, the actual plane manufacturing part of the company was undesirable due to perceived poor “Return on Net Assets.” The theory they pitched to shareholders was they should sell off non obviously profitable divisions so they reduced asset liability while keeping the same or better profits.

That was their explanation, of course it was a terrible idea.

Note the versions, none of the results give you the official operators page for the current version, 16. They give 9, which went EOL in 2021.

Have you tried recent models? They’re not perfect no, but they can usually get you most of the way there if not all the way. If you know how to structure the problem and prompt, granted.

Them using Google indexes anonymously isn’t intending to solve the problem you think it is. It’s more about incentive structures. Google’s “free” search optimizes for ad revenue now. The API access doesn’t as much, and Kagi certainly doesn’t have an ad incentive. So privacy is a nice bonus, but the real benefit is a customer serving incentive structure.

Wonder how we should interpret the country “XD” being on the list. As far as I can tell its never been used for any real country.

Funny how the DOS equivalent of ls is dir, so before the GUI folder metaphor.

I use Kagi, they provide access to all the main models in a chat interface and have a mode that feeds search engine results to them. It’s mostly replaced search engines for me. For programming work I find them very useful for using unfamiliar tools and libraries, I can ask it what I want to so and it’ll generally tell me how correctly. Importantly, the search engine mode has citations. $25 a month, but worth it.

This must be pandering to shareholders, no company in their right mind would want to compete when Meta is selling their first party headset at a giant loss.

The idea that “it’s ok cause we’d do the same” is ridiculous. There is no comparison: China is an authoritarian government and the parent company is practically an arm of the state. There are legitimate criticisms of American tech companies obviously, but they’re ultimately subject to the market and democratic governments. We shouldn’t be doing any business with authoritarians in the first place, much less inviting them to control a significant social media app in the guise of a legitimate business.

It’s not really special treatment. Generally, it’s understood that the defendant will use a bond company and put up a fraction of the cash. They are trying to balance the defendants appeal rights with not postponing the judgement forever. He’s actually tying up significantly more money this way than he would with a bond.

The actual judgement, should he lose appeal, isn’t reduced.

It runs great now. Most importantly, it supports extensions like ublock.

So this is probably another example of Google using too blunt of instruments for AI. LLMs are very suggestible and leading questions can severely bias responses. Most people using them without knowing a lot about the field will ask “bad” questions. So it likely has instructions to avoid “which is better” and instead provide pros and cons for the user to consider themselves.

Edit: I don’t mean to excuse, just explain. If anything, the implication is that Google rushed it out after attempting to slap bandaids on serious problems. OpenAI and Anthropic, for example, have talked about how alignment training and human adjustment takes a majority of the development time. Since Google is in a self described emergency mode, cutting that process short seems a likely explanation.

Arch for stuff I have physical access to. Nothing’s ever gone wrong, so it’s worth it for the immediate updates and consistency with my other systems. For VPS I use Debian though, occasionally the unstable/Sid branch if I really need the latest updates. There are almost always Debian images available on a VPS.